Remembering Marina Keegan

On a typical afternoon a few weeks ago at Koffee—a popular gathering spot in New Haven—I agreed to meet with Marina Keegan, a Yale senior who was days away from graduating. She was applying for a couple of jobs, and she wanted to kick around some story ideas she had in mind.

One involved a town in Florida where, some fifty years ago, the residents began to hobble themselves in serious and dramatic ways—all in order to collect really cushy disability payments. Not just a couple of folks, but scores of them in a small town of only a few hundred people. Others might see only the reality-show tabloid angle to the story, but Marina was so excited by the possibilities of this story: What would you give up to be rich for the rest of your life? As she described her thoughts about the piece, it was obvious that Marina already had shaped the pitch in this sophisticated way—airing out the odd tale with so many different dimensions that it practically became a primer on America itself. Few journalists ever get to a point where they can see that deeply into a story, and realize that what seemed at first like a somewhat dark bit of haiku might in fact turn out to be a brilliant epic.

The minute I left Koffee that afternoon, I was elated by a rare feeling—the certainty that I had met a future associate, someone I would enjoy knowing and reading for the rest of my life.

There are a handful of writers out there whom I’ve met this way, and each time it happens, it’s memorable. And so, a few days later, I called Marina to see if she could work with me on a radio piece for This American Life. She told me she’d been chosen to work as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, where she had previously been an intern. She might not have known what was happening yet, but I did. It was just the beginning of one of the heady pleasures of this trade—working with a student who would soon become a peer.

My wife looked up from her computer a few days ago to say that a Yale student died, and then she said her name. Marina Keegan. I said it out loud, and even as the name was in the air, there was that cognitive suspension of disbelief. For some synaptic stretch of time—a millisecond? A whole half minute?—I bobbed about in that crazy brain space where it made a kind of protected sense that there were two Marina Keegans out there, the one whose talent I had spotted and this other one in the news. The one I would know for the rest of my life and the one I wouldn’t.

Reading the accounts of Marina’s life in the papers, I quickly got the sense that my experience in Koffee was widely shared: By editors at the New Yorker and the New York Times, artistic directors of the New York Fringe Festival, and producers at This American Life. They had all encountered the Marina I had—a promising student with the kind of insight and confidence that usually comes with years of experience.

For her family and friends, the grief is intimate and personal. But for some in our field—producers and editors, reporters and writers, the loss of Marina is a different kind of tragedy. We lost a talent before we got to know her.